It is reasonable to wonder what could have held neoliberalism together under the centrifugal forces threatening to fragment it into factionalism. David Harvey propounds the Marxist position that it is straightforwardly a class project masked by various versions of “free market” rhetoric. For him, the ideas are far less significant than the brute function of serving the interests of finance capital and globalized elites in the redistribution of wealth upward. Michael Howard and James King proffer what they term an historical materialist reading, fairly similar to Harvey, one that “stresses the importance of the contradictions inherent in the institutions prevalent in the postwar era, and the crises these contradictions spawned in the 1970s.”44 Daniel Stedman Jones divides neoliberalism into three phases characterized by dominant political practices: the prehistory up to the first meeting of Mont Pèlerin, a second phase up to the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher consisting of a monetarist critique of neo-Keynesianism, and a modern phase since the 1980s.45 Jamie Peck gives greater weight to ideas, suggesting that the fragmentation is real, but still offset by a shared commitment to an unattainable utopian notion of freedom. Nevertheless, he credits success in infiltrating the state as permitting wide latitude in divergent component theories: “Only with the capture of state power could immanent critique become rolling autocritique.”46 Peter-Wim Zuidhof suggests that the fragmentation is part of a conscious program of rhetoric to empty out any fixed referent for the term “market.”47 Without denying the force of any of these explanations, there are also a few rather more pedestrian considerations of the actual structure of the MPS and its attendant satellite organizations.
I would suggest that the Mont Pèlerin Society evolved into an exceptionally successful structure for the incubation of integrated political theory and political action outside of the more conventional structures of academic disciplines and political parties in the second half of the twentieth century. Perhaps, one day, it will come to be studied as something new in the sociology of knowledge in the twentieth century. It was a novel framework that served to confine any tendencies to intellectual dissolution, holding the three subguilds in productive tension. Hayek in 1946 initially promoted a vision of the MPS as “something halfway between a scholarly association and a political society,”48 but it evolved into something much more than that. The main reason the MPS should serve as our talisman in tracking neoliberalism is because it exists as part of a rather special structure of intellectual discourse, perhaps unprecedented in the 1940s, one I would venture to propose to think of as a “Russian doll” approach to the integration of research and praxis in the modern world. The project was to produce a functional hierarchical elite of regimented political intellectuals; as Hayek wrote to Bertrand de Jouvenel, “I sometimes wonder whether it is not more than capitalism this strong egalitarian strain (they call it democracy) in America which is so inimical to the growth of a cultural elite.”49 Neoliberals found that Mont Pèlerin was an effective instrument to reconstruct their hierarchy, untethered to local circumstances. Henceforth, I will use the term “thought collective” to refer to this multilevel, multiphase, multisector approach to the building of political capacity to incubate, critique, and promulgate ideas.
The Neoliberal Thought Collective was structured very differently from the other “invisible colleges” that sought to change people’s minds in the latter half of the twentieth century. Unlike most intellectuals in the 1950s, the early protagonists of the MPS did not look to the universities or the academic “professions” or to interest-group mobilizations as the appropriate primary instruments to achieve their goals. Those entities were held too in thrall to the state, from the neoliberal perspective. The early neoliberals felt, at that juncture with some justification, that they were excluded from most high-profile intellectual venues in the West. Hence the MPS was constituted as a closed, private members-only debating society whose participants were hand-picked (originally primarily by Hayek, but later through a closed nomination procedure) and which consciously sought to remain out of the public eye. The purpose was to create a special space where people of like-minded political ideals could gather together to debate the outlines of a future movement diverging from classical liberalism, without having to suffer the indignities of ridicule for their often blue-sky proposals, but also to evade the fifth-column reputation of a society closely aligned with powerful but dubious postwar interests. Even the name of the society was itself chosen to be relatively anodyne, signaling little in the way of substantive content to outsiders.50 Many members would indeed hold academic posts in a range of academic disciplines, but this was not a precondition of MPS membership. The MPS could thus also be expanded to encompass various powerful capitalists, and not just intellectuals.
One then might regard specific academic departments where the neoliberals came to dominate before 1980 (University of Chicago Economics, the LSE, L’Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales at Geneva, Chicago Law School, St. Andrews in Scotland, Freiburg, the Virginia School, George Mason University) as the next outer layer of the Russian doll, one emergent public face of the thought collective—although one rarely publicly acknowledging links to the MPS. Another shell of the Russian doll was fashioned as the special-purpose foundations for the education and promotion of neoliberal doctrines; in its early days, these included entities such as the Volker Fund, the Earhart Foundation, the Relm Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Foundation for Economic Education. These institutions were often set up as philanthropic or charitable units, if only to protect their tax status and seeming lack of bias.51 Some of these foundations were more than golden showers for the faithful, performing crucial organizational services as well: for instance, the Volker Fund kept a comprehensive “Directory” of affiliated neoliberal intellectuals, a list that had grown to 1,841 names by 1956.52 The next shell would consist of general-purpose “think tanks” (Institute for Economic Affairs, American Enterprise Institute, Schweizerisches Institut für Auslandforschung [Swiss Institute of International Studies], the Hoover Institution at Stanford) and satellite organizations such as the Federalist Society that sheltered neoliberals, who themselves might or might not also be members in good standing of various academic disciplines and universities. The think tanks then developed their own next layer of protective shell, often in the guise of specialized satellite think tanks poised to get quick and timely position papers out to friendly politicians, or to provide talking heads for various news media and opinion periodicals.53
To facilitate mass production in a transnational setting, neoliberals actually concocted a “mother of all think tanks” to seed their spawn across the globe. The Atlas Economic Research Foundation was founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher to assist other MPS-related groups in establishing neoliberal think tanks in their own geographic locations. It claims to have had a role in founding a third of all world “market oriented” think tanks, including (among others) the Fraser Institute (Canada), the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information (Venezuela), the Free Market Center (Belgrade), the Liberty Institute (Romania), and Unirule (Beijing).54 Atlas provided, among other services, one convenient conduit to launder contributions from such corporations as Philip Morris and Exxon to more specialized think tanks promoting their intellectual agenda. Later on, the thought collective began to consolidate a separate dedicated journalistic shell to more efficiently channel the output of inner layers of the Russian doll outward, such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation,55 Bertelsmann AG, and a wide array of Internet blog and social networking sites.
When addressing their venture capital angels, the entrepreneurs of the Russian doll would admit that this interlocking set of institutions should be regarded as an integrated system for the production of political ideas. For instance, Richard Fink, one of the primary protagonists in building up George Mason University as a neoliberal outpost, by linking it directly to the Koch Foundation, of which he later became president, informed his prospective funders:
The translation of ideas into action requires the development of intellectual raw materials, their conversion into specific policy products, and the marketing and distribution of these products to citizen-consumers. Grant makers, Fink argued, would do well to invest in change along the entire production continuum, funding scholars and university programs where the intellectual framework for social transformation is developed, think tanks where scholarly ideas get translated into specific policy proposals, and implementation groups to bring